It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.

[We] need people who are kind by instinct, not by effort. But that is what we lack in this time. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters anymore.

Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared an appreciation of this important insight, this painful truth--that the state wants men to be weak and timid, not strong and proud.

In remembering those who lost their lives in the London attacks and the September 11th attacks we continue our commitment to fighting for freedom, democracy and justice.

The narrower we define autism, and the more strictly we control for particular behaviors, the more likely we are to find what I think are the subgroups of autism.

It's a simple thing he [Frank Daniel] taught me. If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.

Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. This is not the case.

Patriarchy is connected to greed, a symptom of a larger force that can only be dispelled through kindness and love. It's basic Buddhism.

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

I cannot love a friend whose love is words.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.